The present disclosure herein relates to a technology for expressing an image by using haptic sensation, and more particularly, to a technology for enabling an image identified through a sense of sight to be identified by haptic sensation, such as vibration.
Haptic feedback expressed by vibration may be provided to a user along with visual and auditory feedback to enable the user to enjoy an image, video, audio or the like to have a higher-quality user experience. In recent, devices, such as a mobile device, touch screen device and personal computer include a separate actuator for generating haptic effects, haptic effect generation software or the like. In general, a typical haptic effect (a sense of button) is pre-programmed and called by a user as needed to actuate embedded hardware (actuator or the like) that may generate a haptic effect. Such a technique may be equally applied to multimedia content, such as audio or video content and in general, haptic information to be output is included in a multimedia content file and the pre-programmed haptic effect is output according to a time axis when playback is performed. In the case of an audio file, a technique that analyzes the property of a sound output when playback is performed, without changing an existing file and converts the sound into vibration has been introduced. In the case of image content, it is possible to pre-produce haptic data in a similar method to that of the audio content and perform output by the pre-produced haptic data when a user touches an image in order to output an actual image file. However, in a case where the haptic data is added to the image content in such a manner, there is a drawback that existing image content should be modified. Also, there is a drawback that the size of the image content increases, because the higher the quality of the haptic data is, an amount of information increases.